Time and Causation

We do what we do because we believe what we believe. Or do we? How does mental causation work? 

The idea that there are real metaphysical necessities relating cause and effect. 

The idea that causation is a relation science will one day discover. 

Slavoj Žižek talking about the big Other in Lacan in relation to Alain Badiou’s theory of the Event. In this lecture Slavoj Žižek discusses the universality of anxiety, Lacan’s theory of truth and subjectivity, the inconsistency of the symbolic structure and his polemic with Badi ... Show More

Our counterfactuals series moves forward to 1989: David talks to Lea Ypi about what might have happened if the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen when it did. Was the night it came down really just one big accident? How long could the East German regime have lasted? And what does the fate ... Show More

<p>In this episode we sit down with Brian Klaas, author of Fluke, and get into the existential lessons and grander meaning for a life well-lived (once one finally accepts the power and influence of randomness, chaos, and chance). In addition, we learn not to fall prey to proporti ... Show More

What is the premise of the Morphic Resonance Theory? The lower laws of nature are more like habits. Meaning, each species has a type of collective memory, the collective unconscious so to speak, not just a memory of behavior like instinct, but also a form. For example, when a cab ... Show More

Physicists have ruled out a mundane explanation for the strange findings of an old Soviet experiment, leaving open the possibility that the results point to a new fundamental particle. <p>The post <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-could-explain-the-gallium-anomaly-2024 ... Show More

You’ve probably already walked by a stranger spreadeagled on the ground. Chances are that if you saw several people already offering assistance, you carried on walking by. That’s due to what is known as the bystander effect. The bystander effect is a psychosocial phenomenon which ... Show More

On December 9, 1965, hundreds of people saw a ball of fire streak across the sky and crash in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. Witnesses at the crash site described seeing a 10-foot-tall, acorn-shaped ship. But before they could determine where it came from, the military shut down the sc ... Show More

The disappearance of Kurt Sova should have been an open-and-shut case. But the deeper you look, the stranger it gets: a mysterious van, a dirty cop, and a prediction that eerily comes true. What really happened that night in 1981?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy an ... Show More

<p>On today’s show we’re going to take a brief history lesson for the year 2020.</p> <p>We saw the first outbreaks of the pandemic in China, followed by countries where the infection had spread. These included Korea, Italy, Japan, Spain and France. Soon after followed Switzerland ... Show More

The story behind one of the most deadly volcanic events in recorded history.